Curious How Much Value Facebook Stock Has Lost?

All the way back on May 18, Facebook stock finally started trading on the NASDAQ exchange. The highly anticipated arrival of the social networking giant on the exchange was followed by a slow decline, and then lots of finger pointing. Now that company’s share price has dipped even lower, you might be wondering how much value the company has lost. The answer: A lot. Better answer: About $35 billion.

When Facebook began trading, the company’s initial price was $38 a share, which quickly jumped to around $41 a share. Unfortunately for the house that Zuck built, there was nowhere to go but down. Yesterday, the stock dipped below $29, and is sitting at $28.84 as of this writing.

Kim-Mai Cutler over at TechCrunch ran down the numbers on Facebook’s total value – its “market capitalization” — last night. Given that there are 2.74 billion shares of the company, Cutler multiplied that figure by the current stock price (then, $28.69) and found a total valuation of $79.02 billion. That’s a far cry from the company’s initial valuation of $115 billion, representing a total loss of some $35 billion.

Of course, because this is the stock market, that value can actually be recouped. The best case scenario would be that the company manages to put out some good news or attitudes of investors swing the other way, driving the stock price higher. With projected earnings looking grim for the second and third quarters, however, that might be a bit of a long shot.

It’s easy to be very doom-and-gloom about these figures; most of us will probably never lose $35,000, let alone $35 billion. However, Facebook has been on the market less than a month and to completely write the company off would be a mistake. Either that or the tech-bubble just burst again. We’ll see.